I listened to this on Tim Ferriss' podcast a while ago. It resonated with me so damn much that I listened to it over and over, letting it dictate as I typed every single word of it. I'd encourage listening to it when life gets up to neck level and there's a fear of going under soon. And here it is below... suppose I could have just bought the book, maybe I will!
"Control your emotions. Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself. Pumleus Sirus.
When America raced to send the first men into space they trained the astronauts in one skill in more than any other; the art of not panicking. When people panic they make mistakes, they override systems , they disregard procedures and ignore rule, they deviate from the plan, they become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. They just react, not to what they need to react to, but to the survival hormones that are coursing through their veins. Welcome to the source of most of the problems down here on Earth. Everything is planned, down to the letter, then something goes wrong, and the first thing we do is trade in our plan for a good old emotional freak out. Some of us almost crave sounding the alarm, because it’s easier than dealing with whatever is staring us in the face. At 150 miles above earth, in a spaceship smaller than a VW, this is death. So the panic has to be trained out. And it does not go easily. Before the first launch, NASA recreated the fateful day for the astronauts, over and over, step by step, hundreds of times. From what they’d have for breakfast, to the ride to the air field. Slowly a graded series of exposures the astronauts were introduced to every sight and sound of the experience of their firing into space. They did it so many times that it became as natural and familiar as breathing. They’d practice all the way through, holding nothing back but the lift off itself, making sure to solve for every variable and remove all uncertainty. Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It’s a release valve. With enough exposure you can adapt out those perfectly ordinary, even innate fears that are bread from unfamiliarity. Fortunately, unfamiliarity is simple to fix. Again not easy, which makes it possible to increase our tolerance for stress and uncertainty. John Glen, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth, spent nearly a day in space, still keep his heart rate under 100bpm. That’s a man not simply sitting at the controls, but in control of his emotions. A man who had properly cultivated, what Tom Wolf later called, “the right stuff.” But you; confront a client or a stranger on the street and your heart is liable to burst out of your chest. Or called on to address a crowd and your stomach crashes through the floor. It’s time to realise that this is a luxury; an indulgence of our lesser self. In space, the difference between life and death lies in emotional regulation. Hitting the wrong button, reading the instrument panels incorrectly, engaging the sequence too early, none of these could have been afforded on a successful Apollo mission. The consequences were too great, thus the question for the astronauts was not how skilled a pilot are you, but can you keep an even strain, can you fight the urge to panic, and instead focus only on what you can change, on the task at hand. Life is really no different, obstacles make us emotional, but the only way we will survive or overcome them is by keeping those emotions in check. If we can keep steady no matter what happens, no matter how much external events may fluctuate. The Greeks had a word for this, apathea, it’s the kind of emotional equanimity that comes from the absence of a rational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don’t let the negativity in, don’t let those emotions even get started; just say “no thank you, I can’t afford to panic.” This is the skill that must be cultivated; freedom from disturbance and perturbation. So you can focus your energy exclusively on solving problems, rather than reacting to them. The boss’ urgent email, an asshole at a bar, a call from the bank, your financing has been pulled; a knock at the door, there’s been an accident. As Gavin Debecker writes in The Gift of Fear, “when you worry, ask yourself, ‘what am I choosing to not see right now?’ What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness, or wisdom. Another way of putting it, does getting upset provide you with more options? Sometimes it does, but in this instance, no, I suppose not. Well then, if an emotion can’t change the condition or situation you are dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion, or quite possibly a destructive one. ‘but it’s what I feel?’ right. No one said anything about not feeling it. No one ever said you can’t cry, forget manliness, if you need to take a moment, by all means go ahead. Real strength lies in the control, or as Nasin Taleb once put it, the domestication of ones emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist. So go ahead, feel it, just don’t lie to yourself by conflating emoting about a problem with dealing with it, because they are as different as sleeping and waking. You can always remind yourself, ‘I am in control, not my emotions. I can see what’s really going on here. I am not going to get excited or upset.’ We defeat emotions with logic, or that’s the idea. Logic is questions and statements, with enough of them we get to root causes, which are always easy to deal with. ‘We lost money.’ But aren’t losses a pretty common part of business? ‘Yes.’ Are these losses catastrophic? ‘Not necessarily.’ So this is not totally unexpected, is it? How could that be so bad? Why are you worked up over something that is at least occasionally supposed to happen? ‘Well, um, i…’ and not only that but you’ve dealt with worse situations than this, wouldn’t you be better off applying some of that resourcefulness rather than anger? Try having that conversation with yourself and see how these extreme emotions hold up. They won’t last long. Trust that. After all, you’re probably not going to die from any of this. It might help to say it over and over again when you feel the anxiety coming on, “I’m not going to die from this, I’m not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this.” Or try Marcus’ question ‘does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straight forwardness?’ Nope. Then get back to work. Subconsciously, we should be constantly asking ourselves this question, ‘do I need to freak out about this?’ And the answer like it is for astronauts, for soldiers, for doctors, and for so many other professionals, must be, ‘No, because I practiced for this situation, and I can control myself.’ Or ‘No, because I caught myself and I am able to realise that it doesn’t add anything constructive.’
Finding the Opportunity.
‘A good person dyes events with his own colour, and turns whatever happens to his benefit.’ Seneca
One of the most intimidating and shocking developments in modern warfare was the German Blitz Creed, or Lighting War. In World War II, the Germans wanted to avoid the drawn out trench fighting of previous wars, so they concentrated mobile divisions into rapid narrow offensive forces that caught their enemies completely unprepared. Like the tip of a spear, columns of panzer tanks rushed into Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France with devastating results and little opposition. In most cases, the opposing commander simply surrendered rather than face what felt like an invisible in-fatigable monster bearing down on them. The Blitz Creed strategy was designed to exploit the flinch of the enemy; he must collapse at the sight of what appears to be overwhelming force. Its success depends completely on this response. This military strategy works because the set upon troops see the offensive force as an enormous obstacle bearing down on them. This is how the opposition viewed the Blitz Creed for most of war. They could see only its power and their own vulnerability to it. In the weeks and months after the successful invasion of Normandy by allied forces, they faced it again; a set of massive German counter offences. How could they face it? Would it throw them back into the very beaches they just purchased at so high a cost? A great leader answered that question. Striding into a conference room at the headquarters in Malta, General Dwight D Eisenhower made an announcement. He’d have no more of this quivering timidity from his deflated Generals. The present situation is to be regarded as an opportunity for us, and not disaster, he commanded. There will only be cheerful faces at this conference table. In that surgeon counter offensive, Eisenhower was able to see the tactical solution that had been in front of them the entire time; that the Nazi strategy carried its own destruction within itself. Only then were the allies able to see the opportunity inside the obstacle, rather than simply the obstacle that threatened them. Properly seen, as long as the allies could bend and not break, this attack sent 50,000 German rushing head first into a net, or a meat grinder as Patent eloquently put it. The Battle of the Bulge, and before that the battle of the Folez Pocket, which both were feared to be major reversals and the end of the allies momentum, in fact were their greatest triumphs. By allowing a forward wedge of the German army through and then attacking from the sides, the allies encircled the enemy completely from the rear. The invisible penetrating thrust of the German Panzers wasn’t just important, but suicidal. A textbook example of why you never leave your flanks exposed. More important, it’s a textbook example of the rule our own perceptions in the success or failures of those who oppose us. It’s one thing not to be overwhelmed by obstacles, or discouraged or upset by them; this is something that few are able to do. But after you have controlled your emotions and you can see objectively and stand steadily the next step becomes possible; a mental flip. So you are looking not at the obstacle, but the opportunity within it. As Laura Engels Wilder put it, ‘there is good in everything, if only we look for it.’ Yet we are so bad at looking. We close our eyes to the gift. Imagine if you were in Eisenhower’s shoes, with an army racing towards you, and you’d seen only impending defeat; how much longer would the war have gone on? How many lives lost? It’s our preconceptions that are the problem; they tell us that things should or need to be a certain way, so when they are not, we naturally we assume we are at a disadvantage or that we’d be wasting our time to pursue an alternate course. When really, it’s all fair game and every situation is an opportunity for us to act. Let’s take a circumstance we’ve all been in; having a bad boss. All we see is the hell, all we see is the thing bearing down on us; we flinch. But what if we regard it as an opportunity, instead of a disaster? If you mean it when you say you’re at the end of your rope and you would rather quit, you actually have an opportunity to change and grow and improve yourself. A unique opportunity to experiment with different solutions, to try different tactics, or to take on new projects to add to your skill set. You could study this bad boss and learn from him, while you fill out your resumes and hit up contacts for a better job elsewhere. You could prepare yourself for that new job by trying new styles of communication or standing up for yourself, all with a perfect safety net for yourself, quitting and getting out of there. With this new attitude in fearlessness, who knows, you might be able exact concessions and find that you like the job again. One day the boss will make a mistake, and then you’ll make your move and out manoeuvre him. It will feel so much better than the alternative; whining, bad mouthing, duplicity, spinelessness. Or take that long time rival at work, or the rival company, the one that causes you endless headaches. Note the fact that they keep you alert, raise the stakes, motivate you to prove them wrong, harden you, help you appreciate your friends, provide a constructive antilog, an example of who you don’t want to become. Or that computer glitch that erased all your work, you will now be twice as good at it since you will do it again. How about that business decision that turned out to be a mistake? Well you had a hypothesis and it turned out to be wrong. Why should that upset you? It wouldn’t piss off a scientist, it would help him. Maybe don’t bet so much on it next time. Now you’ve learned two things; that you’re instinct was wrong, and the kind of appetite for risk you really have. Blessings and burdens are not mutually exclusive; it’s a lot more complicated. Socrates had a mean nagging wife; he always said that being married to her was good practice for philosophy. Of course you’d want to avoid something negative if you could, but what if you were able to remember in the moment, the second act that seems to come with the unfortunate situations we try so hard to avoid. Sports psychologists recently did a study of elite athletes who were struck with some adversity or serious injury. Initially each reported feeling isolated, emotional disruption, and doubts about their athletic ability, yet afterwards each gained a desire to help others, additional perspective, and a realisation of their own strength. In other words, every fear and doubt they felt during the injury turned into greater abilities in those exact areas. It’s a beautiful idea; psychologists call it adversarial growth and post traumatic growth. That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger is not a cliché, but fact. The struggle against an obstacle inevitable propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth; the obstacle is an advantage, not adversity. The enemy is any perception that prevents us from seeing this. Of all the strategies we talked about, this is the one you can always use. Everything can be flipped, seen with this kind of gaze. A piercing look that ignores the package and sees only the gift. Or we can fight it the entire way, the result is the same. The obstacle is the same, one just hurts less. The benefit is still there below the surface; what kind of idiot prefers not to take it. Now the things that other people avoid or flinch away from, we’re thankful for. When people are rude or disrespectful, well that means they underestimate us, a huge advantage. Conniving? Well we won’t have to apologise when we make an example out of them. Critical or question our abilities? Lower expectations are easier to exceed. Lazy? Makes whatever we accomplish all the more admirable. It’s striking; these are perfectly fine starting points. Better in some cases than whatever you’d have hoped for in the best case scenario. What advantage do you derive from someone being polite or pulling their punches? Behind the behaviours that provoke an immediate negative reaction is an opportunity, some exposed benefit that we seize mentally and then act upon, so focus on that. On the poorly wrapped and initially repulsive present you’ve been handed in every seemingly disadvantaged situation. Because beneath the packaging is what we need, often something of real value, a gift of great benefit. No one is talking glass half full style platitudes here. This is a complete flip; see through the negative, past its underside, and into its corollary, the positive.
Follow the Process
Under the comb, the tangle and the straight path, are the same. – Harricletus
Coach Nick Saben doesn’t actually refer to it very often, but every one of his assistants and players live by it. They say it for him, tattooing it to the front of their minds and every action they take. Because just two words are responsible for their unprecedented success, ‘The Process.’ Saben, the head coach of the University of Alabama football team, perhaps the most dominant dynasty in the history of college football, doesn’t focus on what every other coach focuses on, or at least not the way they do. He teaches The Process. The Process in his words; don’t think about winning the SCC championship; don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment, that’s the process. Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand. In the chaos of sport, as in life, process provides us a way. It says, ‘okay, you’ve got to do something very difficult. Don’t focus on that. Simply do what you need to do right now, and do it well. And then move onto the next thing. Follow the process, and not the prize.’ The road to back to back championships is just that, a road. And you travel along a road in steps. Excellence is a matter of steps, excelling at this one, and then that one, and the one after that. Saben’s process is exclusively this; existing in the present, taking it one step at a time, not getting distracted by anything else; not the team, the scoreboard, or the crown. The process is about finishing; finishing games, finishing workouts, finishing film sessions, finishing drives, finishing reps, finishing plays, finishing blocks. Finishing the smallest task you have right in front of you, and finishing it well. Whether it’s pursuing the pinnacle success in your field or simply surviving some awful or trying ordeal, the same approach works. Don’t think about the end, think about surviving. Making it from meal to meal, break to break, checkpoint to checkpoint, paycheck to paycheck, one day at a time. And when you really get it right, even the hardest things become manageable, because the process is relaxing. Under its influence we needn’t panic, even mammoth tasks become just a series of component parts. This is what the great 19th century pioneer of meteorology, James Pollard Espy, had shown to him at a chance encounter as a young man. Unable to read and write until he was 18, Espy attended a rousing speech by the famous Coroner Henry Clay. After the talk, the spellbound Espy made his way towards Clay, but couldn’t form the words to speak to his idol. One of his friends shouted out for him, ‘he wants to be like you, even though he can’t read.’ Clay grabbed one of his posters, which had the word “CLAY” written in big letters. He looked at Espy and said, ‘you see that boy? That’s an ‘A’. Now you’ve only got 25 letters more to go.’ Within a year he started college. I know that seems almost too simple. But envision for a second, a master practicing an exceeding difficult craft, and making it look effortless. There’s no strain, no struggle, so relaxed, no exertion or worry, just one clean movement after another. We can channel this too, we needn’t scramble like we so often incline to do when a difficult task sits in front of us. Remember the first time you saw a complicated algebra equation, it was a jumble of symbols and unknowns. But you then stopped, took a deep breath, and broke it down. You isolated the variables, solved for them, and all that was left was the answer. Do that now. For whatever obstacles you come across, you can take a breathe, do the immediate composite part in front of us, and follow its thread into the next action. Everything in order, everything connected. When it comes to our actions, disorder and distraction are death. The un-ordered mind loses track of what’s in front of it, what matters, and gets distracted by thoughts of the future. The process is order; it keeps our perceptions in check and our actions in sync. It seems obvious, but we forget this when it matters most. Right now if I knocked you down and pinned you to the ground, how would you respond? You’d probably panic. And then you’d push with all your strength to get me off you. It wouldn’t work. Just using my body weight I’d be able to keep you on the ground with little effort. And you’d grow exhausted fighting it. That’s the opposite of the process. First, you don’t panic, you conserve your energy. You don’t do anything stupid like getting yourself choked out by acting without thinking. You focus on not letting it get worse. Then you get your arms up, to brace and create some breathing room, some space. Now work to get to your side. From there, you can start to break down my hold on you. Grab an arm, trap a leg, buck with your hips, and slide in a knee and push away. It will take some time but you’ll get yourself out. At each step, the person on top if forced to give a little up, til there’s nothing left. Then you’re free, thanks to the process. Being trapped is just a position, not a fate, you get out of it by addressing and eliminating each part of that position through small deliberate action. Not by trying, and failing, to push it away with super human strength. With our business rivals we rack our brain to think of mind blowing new product that will make them all irrelevant and in the process we take our eye off the ball. We shy away from writing a book or making a film, even though it’s our dream, because it’s so much work. We can’t imagine how to get from here to there. How often do we compromise or settle because we feel that the real solution is too ambitious or outside our grasp? How often do we assume that change is impossible because it’s too big? Involves too many different groups? Or worse how many people are paralysed by all their ideas and inspirations. They chase them all and go nowhere, distracting themselves and never making headway. They’re brilliant, sure, but they rarely execute, they rarely get where they want and need to go. All of these issues are solvable. Each would collapse beneath the process; we’ve just wrongly assumed that it all needs to happen at once. And we give up at the thought of it. We are A to Z thinkers; fretting about A, obsessing over Z, yet forgetting all about B through Y. We want to have goals, yes, so everything we do can be in service of something purposeful. When we know what we are really setting out to do, the obstacles that arise tend to seem smaller and more manageable. When we don’t, each one looms larger and seems impossible. Goals help us put the blips and bumps in their proper proportion. When we get distracted, when we start caring about something other than our own progress and efforts, the process is the helpful, if occasionally bossy voice in our head. It is the bark of the wise older leader who knows exactly who he is and what he’s got to do. Shut up, go back to your stations, try to think about what we are going to do ourselves, instead of worrying about what is going on out there. You know what your job is, stop jawing, and get to work. The process is the voice that demands we take responsibility and ownership; that prompts us to act even if only in a small way. Like a relentless machine, subjugating resistance each and every way it exists, little by little, moving forward, one step at a time. Subordinate strength to the process. Replace fear with the process. Depend on it, lean on it, trust in it. Take your time, don’t rush, some problems are harder than others. Deals with the ones right in front of you first, come back to the others later. You’ll get there. The process is about doing the right things, right now. Not worrying about what might happen later or the results, or the whole picture.
Love everything that happens. Amore Fati.
My formula for greatness in a human being is amore fati. That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it, but love it, Lice. At age 67, Thomas Edison returned home one evening from another day at the laboratory. Shortly after dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news. A fire had broken out at Edison’s research and production campus a few miles away. Fire engines from the eight nearby towns rushed to the scene, but they could not contain the blaze. Fuelled by the strange chemicals in the various buildings, green and yellow flames shot up six and seven stories, threatening to destroy the entire empire Edison had spent his life building. Edison calmly but quickly made his to the fire, through the now hundreds of onlookers and devastated employees, looking for his son. ‘Go get your mother and all her friends’ he told his son with childish excitement, ‘they’ll never see a fire like this again.’ What? ‘Don’t worry,’ Edison calmed him, ‘its alright, we just got rid of a lot of rubbish.’ That’s a pretty amazing reaction, but when you think about it, there really was no other response. What should Edison have done? Wept? Gotten angry? Quit and have gone home? What exactly would that have accomplished? You know the answer now, it’s nothing. So he didn’t waste time indulging himself. To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We’ve got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens. Because there was a little more than rubbish in Edison’s buildings; years and years of priceless records, prototypes and research were turned into ash. The buildings which had been made of what was supposedly fireproof concrete, had been insured for only a fraction of their worth. Thinking they were immune from such disasters, Edison and his investors were covered for about a third of the damage. Still Edison wasn’t heart broken, not as he could have and probably should have been. Instead it all invigorated him. As he told a reporter the next day, he wasn’t too old to make a fresh start. ‘I’ve been through a lot of things like this; it prevents a man from being afflicted with Un Wee.’ Within about three weeks the factory was partially back up and running. Within a month, his men were working two shifts a day churning out new products that the world had never seen. Despite a loss of almost $1million, almost $23million in today’s dollars, Edison would marshal enough energy to make $10million in revenue that year, $200 plus million today. He not only suffered a spectacular disaster, but he recovered and replied to it spectacularly. The next step after we discard our expectations and accept what happens to us, after understanding that certain things, particularly bad things, are outside our control is this. Loving whatever happens to us, and facing it with unfailing cheerfulness. It is the act of turning what we must do, into what we get to do. We put our energies and emotions and exertions into areas that will have real impact, this is that place. We will tell ourselves, this is what I’ve got to do, or put up with? Well, I might as well be happy about it. Here’s an image to consider; the great boxer Jack Johnson and his famous fifteen round brawl with Jim Jeffreys. Jeffreys, the great white hope, called out of retirement like some deranged Cincinnatus, to defeat the ascendant black champion. And Johnson, genuinely hated by his opponent and the crowd, still enjoying every minute of it. Smiling, joking, playing the whole fight. Why not? There’s no value in any other reaction. Should he hate them for hating him? Bitterness was their burden, and Johnson refused to pick it up. Not that he simply took the abuse; instead Johnson designed his fight plan around it. At every nasty remark from Jeffrey’s corner, he’d give his opponent another lacing. At every low trick or rush from Jeffreys, Johnson would quip and beat it back, but never lose his cool. And when one well-placed blow, opened a cut on Johnson’s lip, he kept smiling, a gory, bloody, but never the less cheerful smile. Every round he got happier, friendlier, as his opponent grew enraged, tired, eventually losing the will to fight. In your worst moments, picture Johnson; always calm, always in control, genuinely loving the opportunity to prove himself, to perform for people, whether they wanted him to succeed or not. Each remark bringing the response it deserved and no more, letting the opponent dig his own grave. Until the fight ended with Jeffreys on the floor, and every doubt about Johnson silenced. As Jack London, the famous novelist reported from the ring side seats, ‘no one understands him, this man who smiles. Well the story of the fight is the story of a smile. If ever a man won by nothing more fatiguing than a smile, Johnson won today.’ That man is us. Or rather it can be us, if we strive to become like him. For we’re in our own fight with our own obstacles, and we can wear them down with our relentless smile, frustrating the people or impediments attempting to frustrate us. We can be Edison, our factory on fire, not bemoaning our fate, but enjoying the spectacular scene. And then start the recovery effort the very next day, roaring back soon enough. Your obstacle may not be so serious or violent but they are nevertheless significant and outside your control. They warrant only one response, a smile. As the stoics commanded themselves, cheerfulness in all situations, especially the bad ones. Who knows where Edison and Johnson learned this epigram but they clearly did. Learning not to kick and scream about matters we can’t control is one thing. Indifference and acceptance are certainly better than disappointment or rage. Very few understand or practice that art, but it is only a first step. Better than all of that is love for all that happens to us, for every situation. The goal is not ‘I’m okay with this’, not ‘I think I feel good about this’ but ‘I feel great about it, because if it happened it was meant to happen’. I am glad that it did when it did. I am meant to make the best of it.’ And proceed to do exactly that. We don’t get to choose what happens to us but we can always choose how we feel about it, and why on Earth would you choose to feel anything but good? We can choose to render a good account of ourselves, if the event must occur, amore fate, a love of fate, is the response. Don’t waste a second looking back at your expectations, face forward and face it with a smug little grin. It’s important to look at Johnson and Edison because they weren’t passive; they didn’t simply roll over and tolerate adversity, they accepted what happened to them, they liked it. It’s a little unnatural, I know, to feel gratitude for things we never wanted to happen in the first place. But we know at this point, the opportunities and benefits that lay within adversities; we know that in overcoming them we emerge stronger, sharper, empowered. There’s little reason to delay these feelings. To begrudgingly acknowledge later that it was for the best, when we could have felt that in advance, because it was inevitable. You love it because it’s all fuel, and you don’t just want fuel, you need it. You can’t go anywhere without it; no one or one thing can. So you’re grateful for it. That is not to say that the good will always outweigh the bad, or that it comes free and without cost, but there is always some good. Even if only barely perceptible at first, contained within the bad, and we can find it and be cheerful because of it."
You can buy the book here. Or get the audio version here.